Craig Hancock

By STEPHANIE ROBBINS BOEDING ’99 | Photos JULIE PAGEL DREWES ’90

It’s the end of an era of music at Wartburg College, and for Dr. Craig Hancock, the hardest part of retiring from his post as director of bands is not the goodbye. “It’s that there’ll never be another hello,” he said.

Hancock said hello to Wartburg in 1995. When he interviewed, students remember him standing on the podium in Band Hall, looking at the Wartburg College Concert Band, and saying, “I’m Dr. Craig Hancock, and I want to be your band director.” College leaders wanted him to lead as well, and he took over the program from Dr. Robert E. Lee that fall, becoming only the second director to command the podium since 1959.

Taking the baton from such a beloved and long-tenured director did not intimidate Hancock. While preserving the heart of the program, he brought his technical expertise — honed at three other Midwest colleges and during his doctorate work at the University of Iowa — and a simple philosophy: “Onward and upward.”

The Wartburg Wind Ensemble plays on the Great Wall of China during its 2013 international tour.
The Wartburg Wind Ensemble plays on the Great Wall of China during its 2013 international tour.

“The trajectory, going somewhere, to keep going up — that was the change I envisioned, the seed from Bob Lee, and I just watered it a bit,” Hancock said. “History will judge whether in fact we did that.”

Wartburg’s concert band program, known as the WCCB, grew to 120 students in the mid-1990s. After Hancock’s first European tour in 1997, he split the WCCB into two groups: the Symphonic Band, which rehearsed three times a week, and the Wind Ensemble, an auditioned group that gathered every weekday in late afternoon and became the touring instrumental ensemble.

27 Years in Numbers

27 tours that traveled to 13 countries and 20 states
5,300 rehearsals
974 concerts
116 Christmas with Wartburg performances
More than 1,000 works conducted with college bands
About 110 potential band directors trained as music education majors
About 165 student-teachers supervised
About 2,100 instruments repaired

Other changes came throughout Hancock’s tenure at Wartburg. In 2004, the international tour rotation among the college’s auditioned ensembles changed to every three years, and he began to dream of helping students experience a totally different culture.

“I set my sights on Japan. What’s less comfortable than a place where you can’t even read the language?” said Hancock. “If my job as a college professor is to take you out of your comfort zone and challenge you, without endangering you, and you do something you never dreamed you would do, then let’s go to Japan and see the sights and live with the families for a month.”

And so began a Wind Ensemble tradition of alternating May Term tours between Europe and Asia. “The stars in their eyes are just as bright about both places, the memories from both places are just as bright, the changes in their worldview are just as phenomenal,” Hancock said of Wartburg students’ experiences abroad.

Hancock discovered a sign in a park the first morning he spent in Beijing that has come to have special meaning for him. “The paths split, and here in America we would make a beeline through the shortest distance. But there was a small sign there in that park that said, ‘The grass has feelings too.’ Since that moment, that’s been my best definition of the difference between their culture and ours.”

At the Wind Ensemble’s home concert on April 10, before heading out on tour, Hancock directed the group as usual until near the end, when the students abruptly stood up and exited the stage. A group of concert band alumni then filed into the seats on stage and, under the direction of Jeana Larson ’01, played the premiere of a piece commissioned to celebrate Hancock’s life and career: Celebration Fanfare composed by Joshua Evanovich ’07.

Larson, current president of the Iowa Bandmasters Association, also presented Hancock with the Friend of IBA award; he is only the second educator to receive the statewide honor. “He’s had hundreds of band directors in Iowa alone from his 42-year teaching career,” said Larson when giving the award. “He has spent countless hours traveling, leading clinics, teaching, and fixing instruments for students throughout the Midwest so they, too, can experience the joy of being in a band.”

On May 25, Hancock conducted the Wartburg College Wind Ensemble for the final time in a special concert where alumni and colleagues from throughout his tenure spoke about his impact and their favorite memories. The event followed Hancock’s final tour with the group, originally planned to be the Wind Ensemble’s regular May Term European tour. It was re-envisioned as a tour of the American Heartland to fit the tightened travel parameters of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had canceled all traveling ensemble tours the previous two years.

Both concerts were followed by receptions where alumni and well-wishers gathered and had the opportunity to complete a page in a memory book created by alumna Kristin Vale Cudzewicz ’11, which she presented as another surprise to Hancock during the April 10 concert. The April 10 and May 25 concerts, along with the alumni band performance, can be watched on Knight Vision at www.wartburg.edu/knightvision.

In reflecting on retirement, Hancock thought back to his European travels over the years. “I’d like to go back to visit some of the places I’ve been: Rothenburg, Germany, the old soul of it; London; Prerov in the Czech Republic. There’s enough of a Renaissance man in me that I would’ve liked the Middle Ages — the ‘old world’ places appeal to me,” he said.

Favorite Places

Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany
Zeven, Germany
Eisenach, Germany
Uto, Japan
Beijing, China
Salzburg, Austria
Prerov, Czech Republic

Alumni, colleagues, and friends created a travel fund that will help make those dreams a reality for Hancock and his wife, Elizabeth.

Hancock will continue to serve as pastor at his local church and as director of the Greater Waverly Municipal Band in the summer, and he plans to conduct clinics and judge school music contests.

“It’s the fact I’m not waving a stick for an hour a day, interacting with students, and making music, that’s what I’ll miss … not the logistics of the job, the coming in in the morning. It’s the people.”

Favorite Band Pieces

The Lord of the Rings Symphony 
Irish Tune from County Derry      
Festive Overture, op. 96 
Composition VIII O Magnum Mysterium       
Any works by Claude T. Smith